The Real Story of Racism at the USDAhttps://www.thenation.com/article/real-story-racism-usda/Chris KrommJul 23, 2010The USDA's real race problem is its history of discrimination against African-American, Native American and other minority farmers who were pushed off their land.]]>

Right now, if you do a web search of the words "racism" and "USDA," the majority of links will steer you to coverage of this week’s Shirley Sherrod affair, in which the African-American US Department of Agriculture staffer based in Georgia resigned after a conservative website reversed the meaning of a speech she gave last year to imply she would deny farm loans to whites.

It’s an astonishing development given the history of race relations at the USDA, an agency whose own Commission on Small Farms admitted in 1998 that "the history of discrimination at the US Department of Agriculture…is well-documented"—not against white farmers but African-American, Native American and other minorities who were pushed off their land by decades of racially biased laws and practices.

It’s also a black eye for President Obama and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, who signaled a desire to atone for the USDA’s checkered past, including pushing for funding of a historic $1.15 billion settlement that would help thousands of African-American farmers but now faces bitter resistance from Senate Republicans.

Forced Off the Land

Any discussion about race and the USDA has to start with the crisis of black land loss. Although the US government never followed through on its promise to freed slaves of "forty acres and a mule," African-Americans were able to establish a foothold in Southern agriculture. Black land ownership peaked in 1910, when 218,000 African-American farmers had an ownership stake in 15 million acres of land.

By 1992, those numbers had dwindled to 2.3 million acres held by 18,000 black farmers. And that wasn’t just because farming was declining as a way of life: blacks were being pushed off the land in vastly disproportionate numbers. In 1920, one of out seven US farms were black-run; by 1992, African-Americans operated one out of 100 farms.

The USDA isn’t to blame for all of that decline, but the agency created by President Lincoln in 1862 as the "people’s department" did little to stem the tide—and in many cases, made the situation worse.

After decades of criticism and an upsurge in activism by African-American farmers, the USDA hosted a series of "listening sessions" in the 1990s, which added to a growing body of evidence of systematic discrimination:

Black farmers tell stories of USDA officials—especially local loan authorities in all-white county committees in the South—spitting on them, throwing their loan applications in the trash and illegally denying them loans. This happened for decades, through at least the 1990s. When the USDA’s local offices did approve loans to Black farmers, they were often supervised (farmers couldn’t spend the borrowed money without receiving item-by-item authorization from the USDA) or late (and in farming, timing is everything). Meanwhile, white farmers were receiving unsupervised, on-time loans. Many say egregious discrimination by local loan officials persists today.

Among those concluding that such racial bias persisted were the USDA’s own researchers: In the mid-1990s, they released a report [pdf] which, analyzing data from 1990 to 1995, found "minorities received less than their fair share of USDA money for crop payments, disaster payments, and loans."

Adding insult to injury, when African-American and other minority farmers filed complaints, the USDA did little to address them. In 1983, President Reagan pushed through budget cuts that eliminated the USDA Office of Civil Rights—and officials admitted they "simply threw discrimination complaints in the trash without ever responding to or investigating them" until 1996, when the office re-opened. Even when there were findings of discrimination, they often went unpaid—and those that did often came too late, since the farm had already been foreclosed.

In 1997, a USDA Civil Rights Team found the agency’s system for handling civil rights complaints was still in shambles [pdf]: the agency was disorganized, the process for handling complaints about program benefits was "a failure," and the process for handling employment discrimination claims was "untimely and unresponsive."

A follow-up report [pdf] by the GAO in 1999 found 44 percent of program discrimination cases, and 64 percent of employment discrimination cases, had been backclogged for over a year.

But African-American farmers had misgivings with the Pigford settlement. For one, only farmers discriminated against between 1981 and 1996 could join the lawsuit. Second, the settlement forced farmers to take one of two options: Track A, to receive an immediate $50,000 cash payout, or Track B, the promise of a larger amount if more extensive documentation was provided—a challenge given that many farmers didn’t keep records.

Many farmers who joined the lawsuit were also denied payment: By one estimate, nine out of ten farmers who sought restitution under Pigford were denied. The Bush Department of Justice spent 56,000 office hours and $12 million contesting farmers’ claims; many farmers feel their cases were dismissed on technicalities.

The Politics Behind the Sherrod Affair

Shortly after coming into office, President Obama and his chief at the Department of Agriculture, Iowa’s Tom Vilsack, signaled a change in direction at USDA. Vilsack declared "A New Civil Rights Era at USDA," and stepped-up handling of civil rights claims in the agency.

This year, Vilsack and the USDA also responded to concerns over handling of the Pigford case, agreeing to a historic second settlement—known as Pigford II—in April that would deliver another $1.25 billion to farmers who were excluded from the first case. As Vilsack declared:

We have worked hard to address USDA’s checkered past so we can get to the business of helping farmers succeed. The agreement reached today is an important milestone in putting these discriminatory claims behind us for good.

But the Pigford II case was very much still alive when right-wing media outlets went after Shirley Sherrod this week. Sherrod herself had received $150,000 from the USDA last year as part of the original Pigford lawsuit, which has been bitterly opposed by Republicans and conservative media.

Given the stakes of the Pigford II decision—which again affirms the present-day consequences of decades of racial discrimination—and the sharp partisan battle over spending in Congress, black farmer advocates don’t think the attacks on Sherrod this week are a coincidence.

And given the history of racial discrimination at USDA, they can’t help but note the hypocrisy. As Gary Grant, president of the 20,000-strong Black Farmers & Agriculturalists Association, said in a statement [pdf]:

The statement from Tom Vilsack, Secretary of Agriculture, that USDA does not "tolerate" racial discrimination is a complete lie. Talk to almost any family member of a black farmer or check out … the government’s documentation of how USDA employees, on the local and federal level discriminated against black farmers, in particular. And nothing was ever done to penalize the all white officials bent on destroying a society of black farmers across the nation: not one firing, not one charge brought, and not one pension lost. Yet at the first erroneous offering by a conservative blogger that a black woman from USDA might have discriminated, she is immediately forced to resign.

Which raises the question: Where was the Republican and conservative concern over USDA "racism" before this week’s swiftboating of Shirley Sherrod?

President Bush headed to the Gulf Coast this week to check on the status of the this region’s recovery, eighteen months after Hurricane Katrina struck shores. Bush probably needs the refresher: He hasn’t set foot in the still-hobbled region in six months, and didn’t even mention the Gulf in his January State of the Union address.

But when asked to single out what is most to blame for the ongoing crisis in the Gulf Coast, many Gulf residents will quickly point to Washington. It was ineffectual levees–built and overseen by the US Army Corps of Engineers–that flooded 80 percent of New Orleans, wiping out thousands of homes, hospitals and schools. It was the botched emergency response, “coordinated” by now-disgraced FEMA officials in DC, that contributed to the deaths of hundreds trying to flee the storm.

Now, a year and half after Katrina, a failed policy at the highest levels of government is to blame for the “second tragedy” of Katrina: a stalled recovery that keeps thousands of Gulf residents in limbo and has left neighborhoods from the Lower Ninth Ward to East Biloxi looking like the storm hit yesterday. And it will take drastic change in national policy if the Gulf is to have a more vibrant future.

When Bush comes to New Orleans, many will remember the pledge he delivered two weeks after the storm, standing in Jackson Square, the St. Louis Cathedral shining behind him: “Throughout the area hit by the hurricane, we will do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes, to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives,” he said. “And all who question the future of the Crescent City need to know there is no way to imagine America without New Orleans, and this great city will rise again.”

But much of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast haven’t come back. Indeed, for thousands of people, the Katrina disaster never ended.

More than 100,000 displaced Gulf residents still live in FEMA trailers or receive “temporary” housing aid. Children are put on waiting lists to attend public schools, which are struggling to hire teachers. Hospitals and clinics across the coast are still shuttered.

As TV crews descended on New Orleans for Mardi Gras last week, city officials tried to be upbeat. But Bill Quigley, a public-interest lawyer in New Orleans, said the reality was visible to anyone who wandered out of the French Quarter: “Visitors to New Orleans can still stay in fine hotels and dine at great restaurants,” he said. “But less than a five-minute drive away lie miles of devastated neighborhoods that shock visitors. Locals call it ‘the Grand Canyon effect’–you know about it, you have seen it on TV, but when you see it in person it can take your breath away.”

If Bush ventures beyond his New Orleans photo op–at a charter school, while 44 percent of public schools remain closed–he’ll see the tragedy that has kept tens of thousands of the Gulf’s people from returning home and has made day-to-day life for many in the region a struggle for survival.

The scale of the problem demands bold, national action. But by almost any measure, Washington has failed so far to meet the challenge–shattering many people’s faith in the federal government’s ability to help those in desperate need.

The newly elected Democratic Congress has promised to right the wrongs in the Gulf, but people in the Gulf are skeptical. Wasn’t it Nancy Pelosi, now Speaker of the House, who waited six months after one of the country’s biggest disasters to come visit the region? Katrina also hasn’t been a big policy issue in the new Congress, but Democrats say that will change.

“For our future to be strong, all of our communities must be strong,” Pelosi said in a January 19 speech at the National Press Club. “It says in the Bible, “when there is injustice in the world, the poorest people, those with the least power, are injured the most.” That was certainly true for the people of Hurricane Katrina. Hurricane Katrina was a natural disaster compounded by a man-made disaster. It is now eighteen months past time to get our response right.”

There is plenty the new Congress and the President can do to help revive the Gulf Coast. In a report released this week, “A New Agenda for the Gulf Coast,” the Institute for Southern Studies Gulf Coast Reconsruction Watch offers dozens of practical proposals–put forward by Gulf leaders and policy experts–that Washington can act on now to put the region back on the road to recovery. For example:

• Lack of affordable housing is one of the biggest barriers. Washington can help Gulf residents get back into homes by speeding up compensation to homeowners, extending aid to renters, cracking down on insurance companies that deny coverage and reversing the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s decision to raze 5,000 barely damaged public housing units in New Orleans.

• Plans to repair Louisiana’s broken healthcare system through a Medicaid waiver and Medicare pilot project have been delayed. Washington can help by reviving these efforts, by linking displaced patients with care and injecting resources into community-based clinics.

• The region’s economy is still hobbling and good jobs are scarce, yet efforts like the Bush Administration’s “Gulf Opportunity Zones” have been scattershot and ineffective. Attaching accountability standards to federal subsidies–as well as launching a Gulf Civic Works Program to hire 100,000 displaced people to rebuild their own communities–could transform the region.

• The 2007 hurricane season is less than four months away, but the Gulf’s storm defenses are still inadequate. Watchdogs are calling for prompt building of levees that can withstand a Category 5 hurricane, and for Congress to create a commission to investigate levee failures and cancel wasteful projects like the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet Canal, which helped magnify Katrina’s intensity.

The solutions are there, and it’s not too late. All that’s required is for national leaders to live up to their promises and responsibility to rebuild the Gulf Coast. Until they see action, the region’s people will keep holding signs like the one seen at Mardi Gras last week: “Washington, throw us something!”

Chris Kromm and Jill Doub are contributors to the upcoming report “North Carolina at War” (Institute for Southern Studies/Southern Exposure, March 2007). Elena Everett contributed research for this story, an earlier version of which appeared on the institute’s blog, Facing South.

The three pilots all live in quiet suburbs, twenty minutes southeast of Raleigh, North Carolina. When they fly, they use aliases: Capt. James Fairing, Eric Matthew Fain and Kirk James Bird. And their stately homes are all within a half-hour drive of the rural Johnston County Airport and flight hanger of Aero Contractors–the CIA-linked company at the center of new investigations into US “renditions” of terror suspects to countries with lax torture laws.

In a fast-moving story being followed by multiple news organizations (including ours, Southern Exposure), the identities of the three Aero contract pilots linked to the CIA’s rendition flights have been discovered. Closing in on the actual pilots involved could be a major breakthrough, fueling legal and governmental challenges in Germany, Italy and in US courts against what human rights groups call “torture taxis.”

On February 18 the Los Angeles Timesreported it had visited the homes of the three North Carolina pilots who, despite using different names, clearly matched pictures on file with the FAA of pilots contracting with Aero. As the Times reported, flight and phone records also show they are the same pilots who made calls back to North Carolina while on layovers during rendition flights, from resort islands like Ibiza and Majorca.

In January, Southern Exposure also visited the homes of the pilots. The suspects quickly closed their doors after clearly rehearsed statements saying they didn’t know what we were talking about, and to get off their property. But we can corroborate the Times story that the men match photographs of the Aero pilots linked to the rendition flights, and that they live close to the secretive, state-of-the-art rural airport near Smithfield, North Carolina.

The hunt for the CIA-linked pilots intensified in January when the German government announced it was seeking three “ghost pilots,” and ten other associates, in the December 2003 nabbing of Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent. Masri claims that he was abducted in Macedonia, where he was detained for three weeks, and then flown to Afghanistan for a brutal interrogation. Flight data shows an Aero Contractors jet leaving Macedonia and headed to Kabul on January 24, 2004–the day after Masri’s passport was marked with a Macedonian exit stamp. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice later reportedly ordered Masri’s release after his arrest was shown to be a case of mistaken identity.

German federal prosecutors–along with pioneering journalists at Panorama, an investigative program on German TV–quickly began gathering evidence and helped the American Civil Liberties Union file a US lawsuit in 2005 naming twenty-four defendants, including CIA Director George Tenet, Aero Contractors and ten unnamed employees of Aero. The case was dismissed in May 2006 (“state secrets”), but the ACLU filed an appeal last July, which is still being considered by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The German government’s high-profile announcement in January that it would also be seeking those connected to “black renditions” strained US-German relations and, as the Times reports, has “caused a political scandal…over whether government officials sanctioned the CIA operation.”

More countries are taking action: On February 16, an Italian judge issued arrest warrants for twenty-six suspected CIA operatives who are accused of abducting a Muslim cleric outside his mosque in Milan in February 2003 and delivering him to Egypt, where his lawyer says he was tortured. The trial is set for June 8 in Milan. One of the pilots involved is linked to the German case.

Even back home in North Carolina, Aero and the pilots are under growing scrutiny. At the urging of Stop Torture Now and other groups, twenty-two state legislators sent a letter in January requesting the North Carolina Attorney General to get the State Bureau of Investigations involved. The SBI, the lawmakers wrote, “should investigate credible allegations that Aero Contractors conspired to commit federal crimes and then provided material support to the commission of those crimes on property owned by the State of North Carolina.”

The North Carolina SBI has so far declined to investigate, but the trail to the torture pilots is only getting hotter.

Reverend Luke Nguyen is hastily stuffing a white cleric’s collar around his neck as our car edges closer to his latest nemesis. “They don’t like it when I come here,” he says, pointing to the looming gates of the Chef Menteur Landfill–a sprawling waste site buried in mountains of hurricane debris. Father Luke has been battling the dangerous, unlined dump from the day it opened near his Village de l’Est neighborhood in New Orleans East in February, and he’s braced for another standoff.

The security guard takes one look at the feisty priest and quickly retreats. Father Luke shrugs; city officials have been backing down ever since he began leading thousands of Vietnamese residents back to rebuild east New Orleans–the last area to dry after Katrina’s floods–a month after the storm.

“I came back on October 2 with a permit; then the second week a few of us came back to live,” Father Luke remembers back at the rectory of Mary Queen of Vietnam Church. “On the third weekend of October 2,000 parishioners came to mass, with no lights. We served 3,500 egg rolls. That’s how you get people to come back.”

Getting people back, he declines to mention, also meant breaking the law. The resettlement of New Orleans East was civil disobedience, a mass act of defiance against Mayor Ray Nagin’s orders barring residents from returning to great stretches of the city. But the fishers, factory workers and grocery owners of Village de l’Est came back anyway, 3,000 in all–and, without fanfare, the city caved. Water and power lines were rebuilt, schools have been rehabbed and planners are now finishing blueprints to revive the two-block business district, for the Mayor’s review.

Few places devastated by Hurricane Katrina have a success story to tell like the tightly knit Vietnamese community of New Orleans East. But in many ways, Father Luke and the outlaws of Village de l’Est symbolize a gritty, grassroots movement that has grown and spread throughout the Gulf Coast since Hurricane Katrina.

It’s a movement without the luxury of high expectations. Many of its people are still deeply wounded by loss, in a place where people’s patience is fraying or gone (a mood expressed in New Orleans by the recent rise of racist graffiti and bumper stickers, like Go Back to Houston). The lives of many Katrina activists are tied up with day-to-day struggles for survival, recovery and dignity, while they strive to keep their eyes on the prize of justice for all. They’ve been blown apart from each other, with more than 200,000 evacuees still scattered across the nation.

But the Katrina movement has also scored surprising victories, even if it has had to settle for merely derailing the worst of what New Orleans writer Jordan Flaherty calls the “orgy of greed and opportunism” unleashed by the storms. It has also inspired ordinary people to become extraordinary leaders, and awakened a new generation of activists in the South and beyond.

“Y’all know who you are.” Khalil Tian Shahyd, a New Orleans native and graduate student back in town to work for the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund and Oversight Coalition, is staring down a few squirming members of the audience. We’re at a neighborhood planning forum in June, a free-for-all assembly at the dingy Musician’s Union Hall. Shahyd wants people to face the elephant in the room: the fact that nearly half the city is still in exile. “You have no right to be planning for neighborhoods when most of those people can’t get back home,” Shahyd berates the crowd. “There’s no way to justify this–morally, ethically, any way.”

The right to return for the displaced has been at the heart of the Katrina movement’s agenda since day one, when it became clear that a toxic gumbo of political and corporate agendas–leavened with staggering official incompetence–would prevent many from making it back.

Here in New Orleans, it’s also the issue where activists won their most impressive early victories. The first was convincing Mayor Nagin to shelve the rebuilding plans of his own Bring New Orleans Back commission, unveiled by the pro-developer Urban Land Institute in November [see Mike Davis, “Who Is Killing New Orleans?” April 10]. Ignoring that a future storm could ravage practically any part of New Orleans, the ULI proposed that only the poorer, blacker neighborhoods be written off and planted over so the city might have a “smaller footprint.”

“Over my dead body,” said Carolyn Parker of the Lower Ninth Ward, echoing a backlash that exploded at city forums and evacuee town meetings nationwide. Nagin grew more nervous as another front opened on the right to return: the burgeoning “stop the bulldozers” movement. Led by the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund, ACORN and other community groups, along with allies at the Loyola Law Clinic and the Advancement Project in Washington, DC, by January they had physically blocked a demolition in the Lower Ninth and won an injunction to save more than 2,500 homes from being flattened without notification of the owners.

The revolt soon spread to public housing. Even though most of the city’s 38,000 public rental units were only lightly damaged, officials spent $1.5 million to barricade the developments and keep the working poor at bay. But groups like N.O. H.E.A.T. and C3/Hands Off Iberville worked to get residents back into the Iberville development–long coveted by the lords of real estate thanks to its proximity to the French Quarter–before the city could stop them.

The uprisings not only temporarily scuttled the developer agenda, it also helped change the political course of New Orleans. With the African-American vote shrinking, the mildly liberal Mitch Landrieu seemed destined to become the first white mayor since 1979. But Nagin, in part by rejecting plans to level black neighborhoods, won 80 percent of black voters, who were mobilized and bused in by the Jeremiah Project, NAACP, ACORN and others. “I’m no fan of Nagin; he’s in the pocket of the folks with money,” one woman said. “But I’ll be damned if we’ll let them take over”–“them” being the downtown elite who seemed a bit too excited over prospects of a “whiter, lighter city.”

But the right to return is about more than just housing; the displaced–especially families–face obstacles at every turn. Hospitals are still closed, only fifty-seven of 117 city schools will open this fall, daycare centers are almost nonexistent. Sixty percent of city establishments still don’t receive electricity. For many, coming home is a fading dream. “We care about the right to return,” says Pam Broom, who was displaced to Atlanta, then Durham, North Carolina. “But now, we’re just trying to make community wherever we are.”

The irony is that, just as many of Katrina’s displaced are moving on, grassroots voices may finally be poised to have a say in the city’s future. Thanks to community pressure–and the promise of $3.5 million from the Rockefeller Foundation–in July the city created a Unified New Orleans Plan, which teams up neighborhood groups with expert planners in a bottom-up process of rebuilding. At the eleventh hour, ACORN applied to be recognized as a planner group, and succeeded–a big step up from blocking bulldozers. “Now we’re at the table,” says ACORN founder Wade Rathke, based in New Orleans. “We’re now in a position to help hundreds of people who want to get back into their neighborhoods.”

Khalil Tian Shahyd insists that a plan that doesn’t include the displaced from the beginning is fatally flawed. He gives an example: “Residents haven’t been allowed back to Lafitte public housing, but it’s at the center of a plan called the ‘Lafitte Corridor Development,’ where the city wants to sell property to movie studio complexes.” Such rebuilding without representation would be especially tragic at Lafitte, he says, “the center of black Mardi Gras.” But Shahyd, who spent a semester observing community-led planning in Kerala, India, believes that if people are brought back home, the process could be a way to engage ordinary New Orleanians in the decisions that affect their lives, a “brilliant opportunity to rethink democracy.”

Ask Katrina activists what it will take to turn around the region’s fortunes, and many will come back to the idea that the Katrina movement must go national–even international (what about the United Nations principles guaranteeing rights for “Internally Displaced People”?).

For one, Katrina activists need good allies; they can’t do it all alone. But it also speaks to the need for federal accountability. “The way we see it, it was federally run levees that failed and caused most of the death and destruction,” observes Darryl Malek-Wiley, a longtime New Orleans activist. “So the federal government owes us something. Call it reparations.” And not just money for no-bid contracts, rescuing Army bases and tax-break corporate “GO Zones,” but resources for people’s needs.

Where has been the national movement to demand justice for the Gulf and its people? Aside from tossing a few political hand grenades after the storm, Democrats largely dropped Katrina as a major issue; House minority leader Nancy Pelosi didn’t make her first trip to New Orleans until March 3, six months after the gravest “natural” disaster in US history.

A handful of national groups have proved to be more useful: The Advancement Project and the NAACP got to work on housing, labor and voting rights. The Sierra Club and other outfits have helped residents address environmental threats. This summer the AFL-CIO unveiled a $1 billion investment from its pension funds to underwrite affordable housing, hospitals and other projects, and Change to Win is helping with a workers’ center. New groups like Color of Change and the Katrina Information Network have heightened media scrutiny, and Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. and former Senator John Edwards have barnstormed the country to talk about Katrina and poverty.

But added up, it’s been a far cry from the broad mobilization or channeling of public outrage that could have changed the course of the past year. And there’s been plenty of outrage: In February 66 percent of voters nationwide said they were bothered “a great deal or good amount” by Bush’s handling of Katrina–far outpacing concern for the Valerie Plame and Jack Abramoff scandals, which were objects of pundit obsession.

“The Democrats and most national groups, they didn’t tap into that anger,” says one African-American activist, who didn’t want me to use his name. “A black city is destroyed, thousands are dead, hundreds of thousands of lives were devastated. We needed a March on Washington moment. They didn’t care.”

The national alliances required to shift federal priorities may still need to gain traction, but the Katrina movement has already left another legacy to the country by inspiring a new generation of activism.

Far from the halls of power, in the devastated Ninth Ward a clutch of volunteers, descendants of another strand of the 1960s freedom movement, are buzzing. And hammering: It’s February, and the mostly white and conspicuously countercultural youth at the Common Ground Collective are erecting bunk beds at breakneck speed.

“Spring break,” explains our guide Matt, a ponytailed DJ from New York. “We’re expecting hundreds of volunteers to come.” As it turns out, March brought 2,900 volunteers from 220 colleges (and eight countries) to Common Ground, a project launched as an emergency health clinic and relief center days after Katrina by Malik Rahim, a former Black Panther. Under the slogan “Solidarity, Not Charity,” Common Ground soon became a beacon for Seattle-generation activists, and has since proliferated new outposts and projects across the city, from house-gutting to “bio-remediation” of soil toxins and the opening of a Women’s Center.

The success and high profile of Common Ground–which has brought some 10,000 volunteers through its crash-course program in mutual aid that includes a radical history of New Orleans and a workshop in “Dismantling Racism”–have overshadowed other impressive youth efforts in the region, such as a spring-break drive that brought more than a thousand students from historically black colleges into community projects.

This is their Freedom Summer, and those making the pilgrimage can’t help but be changed by the experience. They’ve been cast into a scattered but epic battle between the Gulf’s dispossessed–relegated to lives in tents, trailers and exile–and a gathering storm of privateers and power brokers whose ambitions can only sharpen the divide between those who have and those who are clearly holding on to very little.

Which, in the eyes of New Orleans lawyer-activist Bill Quigley, prepares them perfectly for the struggles they face back home. “In New Orleans it’s so condensed and easy to see, but these same forces of destroying our public housing, destroying public healthcare, destroying public education–those things are happening in every community across this country,” Quigley says. “What is happening in New Orleans is coming to your community.”

Do progressives and Democrats have a future in the South? Ever since the great unpleasantness of last November, a chorus of left-leaning pundits have taken the region’s defeats–no electoral votes for John Kerry, zero-for-five in open races for US Senate–as a sure sign that the South is a lost cause. Fold up the tent, the doubters say. Focus our energy elsewhere. Or as one indelicate yet frequently forwarded e-mail after the elections put it, “F*ck the South.”

Not so fast, say the South’s defenders–especially Southern progressives. Given that almost a third of the country lives in the South and it’s growing fast, and that the South still sets the tone for national politics (look at the Tennesseans and Texans who lead the White House and Capitol Hill), ignoring the South is hardly an option.

Besides, there’s a rich progressive legacy in the South, and Democrats are far from dead: There are four Southern Democratic governors, hundreds of Democratic state legislators, and in six of thirteen Southern states, more registered voters identify as Democrats than Republicans.

Enter “New Strategies for Southern Progress,” a gathering of some 200 Democratic Party leaders, academics, journalists and assorted progressives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Convened by Washington, DC’s Center for American Progress; the Center for a Better South; and the UNC Program on Southern Politics, Media and Public Life, the conference aimed to “identify pragmatic and innovative solutions to the region’s toughest problems” and, more boldly, “chart a new progressive vision for the region.”

For inspiration, conference organizers invoked the memory of the LQC Lamar Society, a handful of “New South” moderate-to-liberal Democrats formed in 1969 who championed integration, education and economic development. Lamar Society veterans Hodding Carter III and ex-Mississippi Governor William Winter opened the conference, and for Southerners and South-watchers too young to remember a day before unending GOP victory speeches, hearing the legacy of Jimmy Carter, Reubin Askew of Florida, Dale Bumpers of Arkansas and North Carolina’s own Terry Sanford was a reminder that the “Mind of the South” is never fixed, and can always be changed again.

>From grassroots activists to party insiders, everyone came with open eyes about the challenges–and potential–Southern progressives face. “Conservatives are in charge because they toiled for years and years to come up with the answers,” observed Arkansas Representative Joyce Elliot, a three-term African-American state legislator. “It’s going to take time for us, too.” But attendees left visibly conflicted on some fundamental questions: What kind of politics can–and should–win in the region? And what are our bedrock values and long-term vision for the future?

The differences came into focus on day two, during a panel charting the changing attitudes of the Southern electorate. The pollsters, consultants and academics honed in on a key reason for Democratic losses in the South: the defection of the white moderate. “We’ve lost the white working-class male,” said David “Mudcat” Saunders, the much-quoted Virginia consultant and ambassador of the “NASCAR dads” strategy.

Poll analyst Ruy Teixeira rolled out a compelling set of numbers to back up the claim: Although the ideology of the Southern electorate hasn’t changed over the last decade–it’s now 14 percent liberal, 41 percent moderate and 45 percent conservative, only a hair to the right of 1996–voting patterns have. Bill Clinton got 46 percent to Bob Dole’s 44 percent of the Southern white moderate vote in ’96; in 2004 Kerry had a 58-to-41 deficit to Bush among the same voting group. Even accounting for Clinton’s Southern touch, it’s clear that Democrats have lost ground.

How to win them back? Rally white working voters around economic populist themes against the “corporate elite,” said Professor Susan Howell of New Orleans–although she counseled against talking about race. Bring the debate back to “jobs, jobs, jobs”–but don’t talk about taxing the wealthy or get caught up in “cultural” issues, argued Pope “Mac” McCorkle, a strategist for North Carolina’s recently re-elected Democratic Governor Mike Easley. Embrace those to the right–including, in Mudcat’s opinion, the Sons of Confederate Veterans (“which has two black members, by the way” he added). And definitely find religion.

Many found the blueprint shortsighted, to say the least. “Jesus and NASCAR,” said an organizer for a policy group in North Carolina, “that may be a strategy for electing a Democrat in the next two years, but a long-term progressive vision?” The Rev. James Evans, a white minister at Auburn First Baptist Church in Alabama, noted that “not talking about race won’t make it go away. When we talk about taxes, we’re talking about race. When we talk about education, we’re talking about race. When we’re talking about jobs, we’re talking about race. We have to deal with it.”

Or as Representative Elliot from Arkansas put it, “Are you aware of the tension that’s developing when, in your attempt to reach out to NASCAR people, you move away from progressive issues, like we saw in the last election?”

In the meantime, the descendants of the Lamar Society are gearing up for political victories. “We need to reframe the debate so we can win,” said Andy Brack, a former aide to South Carolina Senator Ernest Hollings who will lead the new Center for a Better South think tank. The center will join other party institutes in the works, including Senator John Edwards’s new Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity, based at UNC, Chapel Hill, and the New South Project, led by a group of senators including Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Mark Pryor and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas–all of which will aim to boost Southern Democrats with a new message and strategy.

As for those at the conference who trace their lineage to civil rights workers, labor activists, populists and other Southerners in search of deeper change–whose insurgencies made many past political gains in the South possible–they may have to look elsewhere for a long-term vision. As one grassroots policy advocate said, “This [conference] isn’t about building a progressive movement. For that, we need our own ‘Southern Strategy.'”

]]>https://www.thenation.com/article/southern-strategies/Is the US Training Terrorists?https://www.thenation.com/article/us-training-terrorists/Chris Kromm,Chris Kromm,Sue Sturgis,Chris Kromm,Jill Doub,Chris Kromm,Chris Kromm,Chris Kromm,Jordan GreenNov 27, 2001 Father Roy Bourgeois, the charismatic Maryknoll priest who has, since 1990, led the annual protest against against the United States' most infamous military training facility, wasn't sure it would]]>

Father Roy Bourgeois, the charismatic Maryknoll priest who has, since 1990, led the annual protest against against the United States’ most infamous military training facility, wasn’t sure it would happen this year. But in mid-September he called around to assess the resolve of the movement. Response was unanimous.

“It’s very important that we be here, because at the very core of this issue is violence,” said Bourgeois. “We’re going to mourn the thousands killed on September 11, but we cannot forget the 75,000 in El Salvador who were victims of terrorists trained at the School of the Americas.”

Graduates of the school implicated in human rights abuses are legion. Human Rights Watch reported last year that seven graduates were connected to Colombian paramilitaries, including Brig. Gen. Jaime Canal Albán, who has been tied to the displacement of 2,000 peasants and at least forty extrajudicial executions.

This year’s protest against the School of the Americas–renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC)–marked a standoff between the recently galvanized peace movement, and the continuing militarization of US foreign policy. But considering the current climate, the massing of 10,000 on November 18 was a significant statement of informed dissent.

Located on the grounds of the Army’s Fort Benning, the facility has remained a potent symbol and a critical mechanism in the vertical integration of the national security apparatus across the hemisphere.

To the veterans of the Central American solidarity movement and the recent crop of globalization activists who want to shut down the facility, the heightened patriotic rhetoric of the past two months has only strengthened their opposition to what they consider a terrorist training camp.

The recent passage of the USA PATRIOT Act made the protests an important test for exploring the boundaries of dissent. The city of Columbus had hoped to block the demonstrations, citing the threat of trespass from multiple entry points and the expectation of “more dangerous groups” than the nonviolent SOA Watch–evidence perhaps of the e-mail surveillance component of the PATRIOT Act in action.

Despite apprehension on both sides, the protests held to a traditional model of nonviolent civil disobedience throughout the weekend, with a peaceful funeral procession in front of the base’s closed gate and more than 100 arrests of protesters who symbolically breached the line.

The gate was gradually festooned with wooden crosses, flowers and photographs as the protesters sang a litany of the names of the disappeared, each name accompanied by the invocation: “Presente.”

The larger part of the protest was made up of parishioners and students, but groups as varied as Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) and Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade were also in attendance. The protesters cut across a broad constituency embracing liberation theology and militant anarchism, with all adhering to a tight set of protest ground rules.

The South is central to the military economy of the country. The region is host to 56 percent of enlisted soldiers stationed on American soil and receives more defense dollars per capita than any other. But residents of this small city of 185,000 in the scrub pines of Georgia–economically dependent on the consumer dollars of Fort Benning?s floating troop population–are far from unanimous in their attitude toward the protests.

FLOC organizer Nick Wood told of being approached in a hotel bar by an active-duty soldier who asked why he was protesting. Wood gave his reasons and the soldier responded, “Thanks, I’m glad to know.” As he was leaving, the female bartender who had been listening told Wood, “Good luck and God bless you.”

What are the prospects for Congressional action to close the Institute? “It’s going to be an uphill battle” admitted Bourgeois. The shaken legislative coalition–last year’s House resolution fell ten votes shy of passage–may not be able to push through a bill in the next session. But the Maryknoll priest is confident that the critical mass of the movement will soon bear fruit. “At some point, they’re going to have to ask, ‘Is it worth it?'”